Young people experience high rates of mental health problems, but very few access professional mental health support. To address the barriers young people face in accessing mental health services, there is growing recognition of the importance of ensuring services are youth-friendly. Indeed, almost a decade ago, the World Health Organisation developed a youth-friendly framework for services to apply. Yet, this framework has rarely been evaluated against health initiatives for young people. This article begins to address this gap. Using 168 semi-structured, qualitative interviews with young service users, this paper explores the extent to which the Australian National Youth Mental Health Foundation, also called headspace, applied the WHO's youth-friendly framework which emphasises accessibility, acceptability and appropriateness (AAA). It argues that headspace was largely successful in implementing an AAA youth-friendly service and provides evidence of the importance of tailoring services to ensure they are accessible, acceptable and appropriate for young people. However, it also raises questions about what youth-friendly service provision means for different young people at different times. The findings suggest that youth friendliness should be applied across different stages of interaction (at initial engagement and in the ongoing relationship between patient and clinician) and at different levels (the environment the care is provided in, within policies and procedures and within and between relationships from receptionists to clinicians).

Although disability services and service providers emphasize the importance of promoting self-determination for people with disability, those working in supported employment are not currently enabled to make self-directed choices about retirement. To address this requires more flexible services, better information about retirement, exposure to real experiences and assistance to express preferences and participate in problem solving throughout the lifespan.

Over the past 50 years, self-neglect among older people has been conceptualised in both social policy and the academy as a social problem which is defined in relation to medical illness and requires professional intervention. Few authors, however, have analysed the concept of self-neglect in relation to critical sociological theory. This is problematic because professional judgements, which provide the impetus for intervention, are inherently influenced by the social and cultural context. The purpose of this article is to use critical theory as a framework for interpreting the findings from a qualitative study which explored judgements in relation to older people in situations of self-neglect made by professionals. Two types of data were collected. There were 125 hours of observations at meetings and home assessments conducted by professionals associated with the Community Options Programme in Sydney, Australia, and 18 professionals who worked with selfneglecting older people in the community gave in-depth qualitative interviews. The findings show that professional judgements of self-neglect focus on risk and capacity, and that these perceptions influence when and how interventions occur. The assumptions upon which professional judgements are based are then further analysed in relation to critical theory.

Although elder self-neglect is of significant concern to adult protective service (APS) workers in the United States, minimal research has been conducted on this topic in Australia. Using qualitative research methods, this article examines how 24 Australian professionals understand situations of self-neglect. Unlike in the United States, where the term self-neglect is used in a broad and all-encompassing manner, participants in this research differentiated among self-neglect (the neglect of self), squalor (extreme neglect of environment), collecting (the accumulation of certain objects), and hoarding (the inability to throw objects away). It is argued that separating out the various behaviors that are classified under the broad umbrella of neglect can be useful in fostering reflective interventions in these situations.

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